3 Ways to Watch the Super Bowl

You can enjoy Sunday's Super Bowl no matter where you sit. Here are three vantage points: for the uninitiated, the somewhat knowledgeable and the truly hard-core

By

Matthew Futterman

Updated Feb. 1, 2013 4:46 p.m. ET

The San Francisco 49ers were a 1980s-'90s powerhouse that spent most of the past two decades wandering through that NFL wilderness known as bad quarterbacking and misguided coaching. They play the Baltimore Ravens, a team once known as the Cleveland Browns which now plays in a city where the old Johnny-Unitas-led Colts still loom over the citizenry's football psyche.

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San Francisco 49ers head coach Jim Harbaugh
Reuters

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But the experts and hypesters who are touting this game as a classic matchup have good reason to make the claim: It offers something for every possible flavor of football fan.

The fan who parachutes in for the big event will relish a family psychodrama and the swan song for all-time great
Ray Lewis,
the Baltimore linebacker who faced murder charges a dozen years ago, avoided prison and found God. For the standard fan of a certain age, raised on smash-mouth rushing, blocking, tackling and deep passing routes, there will be moments when this game may look a lot like classic football clashes of the 1970s. Meanwhile, fans who approach football with the kind of strategic game theory usually applied to nuclear geopolitics are giddy with the prospect that Sunday could be a test of a revolutionary style of play in football history.

The NFL doesn't seem to need brand-name matchups anymore, or legacy teams, or big-market teams. Consider that NBC's "Sunday Night Football," the highest-rated weekly show on television last fall, featured 19 of the league's 32 teams. Fans will turn out in huge numbers for all but the worst teams.

When the game airs at 6:30 p.m. EST Sunday on CBS, more than 110 million viewers are expected to tune in. Here is a guide to help each category of fan take in a potential classic.

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Head coach John Harbaugh of the Baltimore Ravens
Getty Images

Super Bowl XLVII

What I Really Love Are the Commercials

Producers of reality television must be kicking themselves right now for not pitching "Hanging With the Harbaughs." The series would have followed Baltimore head coach
John Harbaugh
and San Francisco head coach Jim. Sons of a lifelong college-football coach, born 15 months apart, they guide their teams toward an inevitable confrontation in the biggest game in North American sports.

John, the eldest, is levelheaded, less athletically gifted and brainier. He lost the quarterback job in high school to his kid brother with the rocket arm. He played defensive back at Miami of Ohio, a second-tier football school, never had a pro career and toyed with politics. Then he took over the Ravens in 2008, and made trips to the playoffs every year. He was the hottest young coach in the NFL—until guess who came along.

Jim is the fiery middle child, the classic, rabble-rousing alpha male who quarterbacked the University of Michigan to the Rose Bowl, then played 14 years in the NFL for four teams, primarily the Bears and Colts. As a kid, Jim beat on John and his friends when they played sports. "You played hockey with Jim and you got bounced around, and that was true for most sports," John Harbaugh said.

Jim has been a quick success nearly every step up the coaching ladder, rising quickly from the University of San Diego to Stanford to the 49ers, where he reached the NFC championship game his first season and the Super Bowl in this, his second one.

Anyone who has taken Psychology 101 knows the oldest child is fated to spend his life coming to terms with sharing his parents and the family spotlight with a younger sibling. Last week, while his parents were on a conference call with the media, John dialed in, masquerading as "John from Baltimore," and asked them if it was true that they liked Jim more than John.

That great football fan
Sigmund Freud
might refer to this as a "tendentious joke"—one with a hidden meaning. "I think every kid feels that way growing up," John Harbaugh said Tuesday. "I think I liked Jim more than me some days."

Aside from the brothers, Ray Lewis's impending retirement after a 17-year career is the sort of second-chance story Americans obsess over. Lewis, the Ravens inside linebacker, was charged with murder in 2000 after a fight in an Atlanta nightclub. He negotiated a plea to a misdemeanor obstruction of justice charge, and became an outspoken Christian. He plays in a Hannibal Lecter-style face mask and is famous for his chilling pep talks, which he gives to his own team and, if his schedule allows, just about any team in any sport at any level that will listen.

I Love Football, But I Have a Life

At its most basic level, football is 22 guys running into each other. It's often not very beautiful, unless you come from the Midwest and were raised to worship former Michigan coaching legend
Bo Schembechler.
Both these coaches were. To them, this line-'em-up-and-knock-'em-down style of football is poetry.

Forgive the fan who confuses the matchup between the Baltimore offense and the San Francisco defense with an Ohio State-Michigan game from the 1970s. Baltimore quarterback
Joe Flacco
is going to spend a lot of time handing the ball off to running back
Ray Rice
and watching him try to follow one of the NFL's last fullbacks (
Vonta Leach
) through the San Francisco defense. Fullbacks have largely been replaced by tight ends and other receiving threats. Rice ran for 1,143 yards this season, but his longest run was 46 yards.

The wrinkle in the Ravens offense is their awesome downfield threat, Anquan Boldin. Just when you think they are trying to set some record on the grind-it-out meter, Flacco drops back and hits Boldin, or
Torrey Smith,
streaking down the sideline.

This is the not the dump-and-run West Coast offense built on short passing that changed the game in the 1980s. Boldin has magical hands and caught just 65 passes this season, but he averaged 14.2 yards per catch. Smith caught just 49 but averaged 17.4 yards. San Francisco's favorite wide receiver target,
Michael Crabtree,
averaged just 13 yards per catch.

The Ravens offense represents a victory for effectiveness over imagination. Coincidentally, so does the San Francisco 49ers defense.

The NFL has been watching New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick design his maze of blitzes and stunts for decades. The San Francisco answer to that is to line up 11 of the fastest, most athletic, hardest-hitting defenders available and tell them to get after the quarterback and the ballhandler like crazed dogs.

"They don't need to do a lot of exotic things," Flacco said. "They can play downhill [straight ahead, no fancy stuff] and go fast."

Outside linebacker
Aldon Smith,
who had an absurd 19.5 sacks this season, explained the science behind the San Francisco defense like this: "You beat the guy in front of you. Then you go and make the big play."

Inside linebacker Novarro Bowman is more blunt. "We're a very physical team, and we just like to go out there and demonstrate it," he says.

In other words, this part of the game evokes the "voice of God" from those grainy NFL Films from the 1970s, with
John Facenda's
baritone narration and swelling music. "We're not going to change what we do and they're not going to change what they do," Baltimore center
Matt Birk
said. "It's going to be pretty straightforward."

ENLARGE

San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick
Associated Press

Only 214 Days 'Til Next Season

Here's where the fun starts, because the outcome of Sunday's game may very well shape the NFL for the foreseeable future.

For much of the last decade, NFL coaches, executives and addicts have been debating whether a team can win it all with an athletic, running quarterback and a wide open, college-style offense where a quarterback's legs are as dangerous as his arm. Each time another traditional quarterback named Manning or Brady or Brees or Roethlisberger won another Super Bowl, it drove another stake into the cause of a 21st-century quarterback. NFL defenders were just too strong and fast and smart.

Then, in November, San Francisco replaced the traditional
Alex Smith
with second-year pro
Colin Kaepernick
and all hell broke loose, especially when Kaepernick lined up 3 yards behind the ball with a running back behind him and a fullback next to him. Some quarterbacks could always scramble for a first down when receivers were covered, but none combined cannon arms with the strength, size, speed and precocious football intelligence of Kaepernick (and Redskins rookie
Robert Griffin III
).

Running a play called a "zone-read option" out of a formation called the "pistol," Kaepernick will read the defense while lurching forward and seeming to hand the ball off. Then sometimes he will pull the ball back to run it himself. Or he can still throw it if he wants to.

Those plays—or even just the threat of them—are quickly turning the mechanical NFL into something more like frenetic, world-class rugby. For a new generation of football addicts, it's the equivalent of last year's Higgs-boson moment, when particle physicists finally found the tiny atomic material that forms the universe.

"You line up in that pistol and you never know which way it's going," said San Francisco offensive lineman
Alex Boone.
"Even when he's throwing the ball, something breaks down and he takes off running."

In the copycat world of sports, a San Francisco win could change how teams pick their players and draw up game plans for years. Likewise, if Baltimore can solve Kaepernick, it will serve as further proof of the tried and true. But that's easier said than done. "Green Bay tried to contain him and Atlanta tried to attack him, and both didn't work," Baltimore defensive lineman Haloti Ngata said of Kaepernick.

Baltimore's best hope may be to freeze outside linebacker
Terrell Suggs
for a moment while looping one of its inside linebackers around him to attack the backfield. Or, they could blitz cornerback
Cary Williams
and trust a safety to cover a receiver. Neither is a great option. The idea is to pressure Kaepernick into a mistake. But that hasn't happened very often, and San Francisco is flirting not just with a championship but a revolution.

"You want to be on the cutting edge," said San Francisco quarterbacks coach Geep Chryst. "You just don't want to end up bleeding."

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